A Study Of Temporal Deictic Projection In Terms Of Politeness Principle

As one of the essential topics in pragmatics, deixis has aroused great concern from linguists home and abroad. An essential characteristic of all categories of deixis appears to be their egocentricity and the speaker generally constitutes the deictic center of the speech event. However, sometimes this deictic centre may be shifted from the speaker to the addressee or other participants in the speech events, or indeed to protagonists in narratives, or even to other spatiotemporal points. This phenomenon is so-called "deictic projection". Despite the fact that the study of such deictic phenomenon in recent years receives increasing attention from researchers, and a number of different approaches, such as cognitive linguistics. and psychology, have been employed to achieve a better understanding, deictic projection, an important but special linguistic phenomenon in language use, has still rarely been observed from the perspective of pragmatics itself, and the related study to its politeness function in terms of Politeness Principle is much more limited.The paper attempts to analyze the phenomenon of deictic projection to investigate its politeness function in the light of Leech's Politeness Principle. To make the research more thorough, this paper focuses on temporal deictic projection in particular. Taking coding time, present tense and psychological time as its orientations respectively, three main kinds of temporal deictic projection are observed in detail from the perspective of Politeness Principle. It is shown that temporal deictic projection can serve the pragmatic function of politeness in communication. In most cases, projection of temporal deixis can help promote interpersonal communication. Of course, in certain contexts, such special linguistic form may also be used to convey a sense of unfriendliness or impoliteness. Furthermore, the investigation of temporal deictic projection in terms of Politeness Principle is of significance for improving English tense teaching. If the concept of deictic projection is introduced into English tense teaching and students are taught to catch the present deictic center, but, on the other hand, not to stick to it rigidly by fully realizing the possible shift of deictic center and the consequent pragmatic functions, they can gain a more flexible command of various English tenses in a wider context of actual use.This paper is made up of six chapters.Chapter One serves as an introduction to the whole paper. It first discusses briefly the history and current situation of the study of deixis and deictic projection, and then the significance of the present study and two main research questions involved in this paper are providedChapter Two reviews the previous studies on deictic projection, mainly including the perspectives of cognitive linguistics and psychology. Furthermore, a brief review of previous related studies on politeness is given likewise in this chapter.Chapter Three makes up the theoretical framework of this paper, mainly introducing Leech's Politeness Principle with its six maxims and three corresponding pragmatic scales of politeness. In the end, the close relationship between deixis and politeness is discussed.Chapter Four is the focus of this paper. Based on making four types of temporal deixis and three pairs of time clear, the phenomenon of temporal deictic projection is approached from the perspective of Leech's Politeness Principle in great detail.Chapter Five is concerned with the implications of temporal deictic projection for English tense teaching.Chapter Six functions as a conclusion of the whole paper. Besides a summary, limitations of the study are pointed out as well.